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Resto druid survival guide for level 100 Legion 7.0 pre-patch! NOTE: This is currently a preview subject to change! With the pre-patch hitting July 19th, here is a short guide covering the major changes you will have to adjust to at level 100. The full guide will be updated some time in the next few weeks for level 110 end-game. Restoration druids are largely similar in toolset & playstyle in Legion compared to Draenor. Thus, you should mostly be able to keep playing the way you are used to for the next month in Draenor content. The goal is still to use mostly HOTs around the raid as your primary healing strategy.

This survival guide covers the following topics:

New Mastery

Spell & ability changes

Stats

Talents

New Mastery: Harmony

The Draenor mastery ability was removed & replaced with a new mastery for Legion.

This new mastery instead increases your healing done by ALL spells for each HOT on your target (e.g., rejuv, lifebloom, wild growth, regrowth’s HOT portion). So, having 2 HOTs on the target will heal more than 1 HOT on the target. Then, 3 HOTs heal for more than 2 HOTs, and so forth.

Additional HOTs from talents can also increase this mastery healing (e.g., cultivation, spring blossoms, germination). Note that effects like living seed, efflorescence, and tranquility don’t count towards the mastery, as they are not considered HOT effects. Cenarion ward only counts as a HOT after the person takes damage (e.g., the ward is consumed) and the HOT portion is ticking down for 8 seconds.

How much does this impact your healing?

Druids are balanced around ~1 to 2 HOTs on a target for the purpose of raid healing. So, in most cases, the main goal will be to avoid casting Healing Touch or Swiftmend on people who don’t have HOTs on them.

While the old mastery buffed you (the healer), the new mastery is based on number of HOTs on each individual target (e.g., if you have 3 HOTs on your tank and 1 HOT on a mage, then the mastery bonus is higher on your tank than the mage).

All HOTs benefit from the mastery (e.g., if you cast Rejuv on someone who has no other HOTs, Rejuv still gets a mastery bonus value of 1 HOT).

In general, your goal should be keeping multiple HOTs on the tank and not worrying too much about the mastery for raid healing (as shown above, the increase in rejuv ticks at 100 don’t make a second HOT necessary for rejuv to be beneficial for your raid). Try not to spam yourself OOM by blanketing people needlessly just because you think you have to HOT stack.

Note that HOTs dynamically update every time they tick. It doesn’t matter what order you cast your HOT spells in when stacking multiple HOTs on a target. Your mastery will check number of HOTs on a target every time it ticks.

Spell and Ability Changes

Removed abilities:

Nature’s Swiftness, mark of the wild, soothe, and genesis are gone.

Dramatically reduced access to baseline off-role damage/utility abilities (NOTE: see the section on level 45 affinity talents for how you can get access to damage abilities for soloing via talents!).

Cyclone: Now only available as a PVP talent at 110.

Most “major” glyphs have been removed (instead, these effects have been baked into abilities, changed into talents, or removed).

New abilities:

Innervate has returned. Now allows all spells cast for 10 seconds to be mana-free (usable on yourself or others).

Revitalize: This is now a mass resurrection spell available to healers. Returns all raid or party members out of combat (revive is 1 person out of combat, rebirth is 1 person in combat). This basically replaces Mass Res, which was taken away from non-healers.

Modified abilities:

Swiftmend: longer cooldown & larger effect. Swiftmend also no longer requires a HOT for you to be able to cast the spell (though due to interactions with the new mastery, HOTs on the target will make it heal for more).

Teleport Moonglade: Will eventually be replaced with Dreamwalking as you level in Legion (gives you access to a larger set of portals to various places).

Efflorescence: Wild Mushroom has been renamed Efflorescence – place a mushroom on the ground to heal targets standing nearby.

Note that minor glyphs (largely impacting cosmetic appearances) are still available as either glyphs or tomes. You apply minor glyphs to the spells themselves, or learn shapeshift forms such as tree form, rather than using the old glyph system.

Stat Priority

Overview.In general, it doesn’t much matter what your gear is like is for the month before legion comes out. There are two general strategies for stats (large group vs small group) since the value of mastery goes down as the number of people in your party goes up. Spirit and multistrike have been removed from all of your gear. For the pre-patch month, just wear whatever is highest ilevel, since you’ll replace everything soon anyway, but here’s a quick set of potential priority lists. Higher ilevel things with more intellect, of course, will always help your healing the most.

Stats for large raids: Haste = crit > versatility = mastery. Mastery doesn’t work very well with large numbers of targets to heal (e.g., groups of 15+ such as LFR or Mythic raids). So, haste & crit seems to come out higher.

Stats for 5-mans & small group content: Mastery > haste = crit > versatility. For smaller groups, mastery clearly comes out ahead of all other stats, due to the ability to stack HOTs on multiple people (regardless of which talent build you take).

Potential Talent Builds

In general, for the Legion pre-patch month, the talent choices don’t matter a whole lot. Below are two potential strategies. The first is the highest output healing build for Legion end-game raiding, focused on maximizing Wild Growth use (turning swiftmend into a spell that primes Wild Growth to heal more). The second is more of a fun 5-man alternative build for beginners that frees up Swiftmend to be used as an emergency tank heal it was meant to be. I’ll do a full set of talent explanations in the full end-game guide I’ll post in the upcoming weeks.

Talent build for large group content such as Heroic/Mythic raids: Prosperity/Soul of the Forrest/Spring Blossoms/Flourish (choose whatever you want for remaining talents at level 30, 45, & 60 – but note the affinity discussion at the end of the post).

Maximizing Wild Growth for large group content: Soul of the Forest (SOTF) is a very strong talent. However, you always time it so you can follow Swiftmend with Wild Growth (thus, Swiftmend now gets used every time it comes off cooldown to buff Wild Growth. Pair SOTF with Prosperity to allow for more Swiftmend casts. Flourish extends the duration of your HOTs (use it after Wild Growth casts once per minute). These three together make your Wild Growth healing incredibly potent for raiding.

Level 90 talent discussion: Spring Blossoms is the most obvious choice for level 90 talents since it allows you to get a HOT component on Efflorescence and is essentially passive bonuses that interact with your mastery. In fights where a 2 minute tranquility works well with encounter design, Inner Peace can be very potent. Germination won’t work as well in raids, due to eating too many GCDs (you’ll get more mastery bonus from Spring Blossoms).

This SOTF build works great for some raid encounters but falls short of a Culvination build in others. So, you may find yourself wanting to change talent builds around in raids depending on the encounter, particularly for more advanced mythic raids.

This healing strategy works by: Casting swiftmend ALWAYS followed by wild growth. Extend the HOT from Wild Growth when flourish if off cooldown (1 x per minute). Keep rejuv/LB on tank(s). Keep Efflorescence under the melee group. Be careful managing your mana between Wild Growth Casts, so you can cast Wild Growth as often as possible. Tranquility on cooldown.

Alternative talents for 5-mans or some raid encounters: Abundance (or Cenarion Ward), cultivation, germination, stonebark (or flourish). Note that you can choose whatever level 30, 45, or 60 talent you want (but see discussion on Affinity level 45 talents at the end of this post).

For the level 15 talents, some people prefer Cenarion Ward over Abundance, since the speedy direct heals from Abundance are causing people to run out of mana too quickly. The HOT from Cenarion Ward (after the person takes damage) also counts towards the mastery bonus.

Stonebark is useful for tank healing in 5-mans, particularly for people who may be struggling to keep the tank alive (this talent increases the healing done to the person you cast ironbark on, so cast ironbark frequently on a tank). However, flourish is a good alternative to boost overall party healing (but only if make sure you use Flourish after you cast wild growth).

Note that some people will likely still take SOTF over Cultivation, depending on the encounter. For beginners in particular, the more passive healing will be really helpful in cases where you fall behind and people drop low. I also think keeping Swiftmend freed up for emergency tank healing is preferable for small group content over using it to buff WG.

The rejuv-focused strategy works by: Keep HOTs on tank & Stonebark (plus Cenarion Ward if you have it) as often as possible. Keep casting rejuvs on any party member taking damage in that fight (you can stack 2 rejuvs per person). Keep Efflorescence under as many people as possible (probably the tank/melee area). Save tranquility for when you can stand still and everyone is taking heavy damage. Use your Healing Touches and regrowths for direct healing when needed (HT is speedy when you have abundance). Use Swiftmend as an emergency burst direct healing cooldown to save a tank or other party member from death.

Affinity Level 45 talents: Druids have always been known as the “jack of all trades, master of none” spec. So, resto used to have a smattering of damage & tanking abilities that almost never got used. So, they stripped out all these off-role buttons from your baseline spec (except for enough spells that you could kill something if you got stuck). Your affinity talent lets you choose an off-role spec where you pick up more abilities that make you pretty decent at one off-role thing at a time, rather than crappy at all off-role things all the time.

If you choose balance affinity, all your spells (including healing spells) get an added 5 yard range. You get moonkin form. This increases your damage in form & allows you to cast several additonal balance spells when you shift into moonkin. The extra range is pretty nice for times when people are super spread out.

If you choose feral affinity, you get a 15% movement speed buff. In addition, you get feral abilities that allow you to have relatively mana-free damage while in cat form.

While guardian affinity gives you 10% reduced damage taken, a raid that is asking their resto druid to off-tank something in the middle of the fight has probably already all died. So, you get little to no good utility from a resto/guardian build – you need the damage from balance or feral way more than the guardian passive.

There is also a full restoration guide up on Wowhead that is complete with Legion-relevant information. I’ll be working on my full resto guide for 110 expecting to launch in a few weeks.

Hi everyone! I haven’t been as active blogging this summer as I’ve been testing legion. I have, however, been busy with writing guides & playtesting for the expansion. Here are some important things to know for my Legion plans:

I am returning to my moonkin/resto druid for Legion raiding, after a 2 expansion (MOP & WOD) hiatus where I raided on my mage. While fire mages will be lots of fun, the druid class hall is just far more awesome than the mage class hall. Plus Eclipse is gone and they updated moonkin form, so I had nothing left to complain about.

My druid leveling guide will be ready to go for 7.0 by the time the pre-patch hits. I have finished a lot of the leveling guide for newbie druids. They made changes to the 1 to 10 leveling process for druids and other relevant changes that I discuss in the guide.

I will have short 7.0 survival guides for Resto and for Balance that will cover the basic changes for pre-patch. This will cover general spell changes (what’s new, what’s gone, and how to survive for a month until Legion launches).

I will make an intro Legion end-game guide for Resto (targeting new level 110 players) that will be ready by the time Legion hits. This will likely be in transition during the pre-patch month.

I won’t likely make a full balance 110 guide, but I will have plenty of resources and basics (such as what life is like after Eclipse is gone). I will also cover the basics of artifact weapons, class halls, and other things important to druids.

For leveling 100 to 110, resto druids can pretty effectively use balance or feral affinity (which should actually do decent damage with a fair amount of survivability). So, the problem for resto druids of healer leveling viability is mostly solved.

They removed the gold cost for spec swapping, such that running multiple druid specs a lot easier.

While you can’t max out 4 artifact weapons very quickly, you can pick one “main” weapon that you keep slotting the highest, and one or two other “off-spec” weapons at about 80% of the power of the main weapon. My /played on my beta druid at 110 is 12 hours. My balance spec has 14 total ranks (across 7 traits) spent in my balance weapon. I have 10 total ranks (across 5 traits) spent in my resto weapon. At some point, my main weapon’s ranks cost somewhere around 10,000 points, and my resto weapon’s traits may still be under 1,000 – in which case, it makes sense to buy cheap traits on the other weapons if you swap a lot.

Also, the druid class hall has a moonkin teacher instructing baby moonkin how to cast spells. Except for that one bad student who won’t stop flying in circles (thanks Poneria and T.G.Q. for finding the baby moonkin for me!). The baby moonkin also make me sad because they remind me of Mourninglory and her 8 moonkinlings. She would have loved this feature if she were around to see it. While the moonkin’s name isn’t a reference to Mourninglory, I still would like to think of it as a small tribute to her helpfulness, as well as a tribute to all druids who work hard to teach others and be kind to the community. It’s nice to remember sometimes how great the druid and Warcraft community can be.

The restoration druid’s mastery has a long history of changes. This is due in part to the fact that Resto druids are a really difficult concept to design, as we’re the only “HOT-based” healer, where our heals tick slowly over time.These HOTs are intended to be weaved together with a small number of direct heals we have access to (so that we can keep up with some amounts of burst damage). We are once again facing a change in the resto druid mastery bonus. The feedback on the Alpha forums from people doing mythic raiding has been overwhelmingly negative. This thread is going to try and contextualize this change, talk about where it falls short, and suggest what other design options might be available. Ultimately, we need to come up with possible solutions, given so many failed designs that have come before.

The short history of resto druid mastery bonuses

To understand why Resto druids have a new mastery (they don’t like) on Legion Alpha right now, we have to talk about all the failed Resto mastery designs. I inserted links to previous mastery discussions along with short summaries (but people are welcome to visit my old mastery threads to see the controversy & how our feelings about mastery changed over time).

Mastery #1:Our first mastery made HOTs heal more on low health targets. This mastery never hit the Live servers because it turned out to be numerically terrible, as I documented in early testing. This was similar to the shaman mastery (which shaman really dislike), but actually worse because each individual HOT tick heals for so little.

Mastery #2: Our next mastery increased direct healing on people who had a HOT. I initially really loved the concept of this mastery, as the post I linked showed. However, it ended up being really problematic in raid healing, where it just didn’t work to constantly chase HOTs with direct heals. Due to the fact that each HOT was on a single person, the minute you had 20 people to heal, the mastery mostly fell apart because having to cast 2 heals on every person was too cumbersome to benefit in raids. This meant that 20-man raid healers didn’t enjoy healing very much during the short period of time where this mastery was live.

Mastery #3: Next comes the version of Harmony where casting a direct heal gives you a buff that then increases your HOT healing done. I will quote directly what made this so appealing: “The best part of the new mastery is that it puts the buff on YOU, and not on your target.” This version of the mastery is one that people came to know & liked (after knowing what the alternatives were), and some version of this mastery stuck around the longest.

New Legion Resto Mastery Explained

The new resto druid mastery for Legion increases your healing done for each HOT you have on that particular target (which can stack up to the maximum number of HOTs the druid can stack). The current Legion mastery thus requires stacking multiple HOTs on the same target. Importantly different from Mastery #2, this increases all your healing done to that target, and allows for stacking the mastery buff multiple times. While the first HOT gets some benefit from the mastery, you need 2 or more HOTs on a target to get the full bonus. Note that this stacks on your target, and NOT on you, which is an important design consideration.

The good:

If you heal one target, it’s possible to stack lots of HOTs on them (lifebloom, 2x rejuvs, regrowth, wild growth). In 5-mans, you’ll have a decent number of HOTs spread around the group, so that most people will have 2 HOTs on them. Numerically, in small groups, the new mastery is the same or better in terms of total healing done today. This also has the potential to be a significant buff to our tank healing, something they want to be relevant in Legion.

The bad:

The new mastery in Legion is actually similar to the Mastery #2 described above. However, it does something slightly different, since the HOTs boost other HOTs in addition to boosting the direct heals on the target. For the same reason that HOT chasing with Mastery #2 was bad, the new mastery suffers the same fatal flaw. To do good healing, you have to cast a large number of spells on a small number of people, rather than healing the person who needs to be healed the most. This requires a lot of setup time, as the “buff” is specific to the person you are healing, and not to you as the healer. While someone else can jump right in, you have to anticipate who might be taking damage and then cast 2 to 3 heals on them to get the full mastery benefit. This is going to be somewhat tedious in raid dungeons, where you may end up devaluing Mastery to a great extent in 20-man raids (where only the tank will reliably get the full mastery bonus out of your heals).

Druids are designed as HOT healers, where we are slow and require ramp up time to reach our full healing strength. Rather than spamming true AOE heals, we weave multiple single-target HOTs on tons of people between AOE heals that have cooldowns. Stacking multiple HOTs on the same person is a slow process – especially if you are responsible for watching 20 people (at 20 people, HOT stacking becomes a potentially frustrating process).

Sigma suggests (on the alpha forums) that: “I get the impression that people are significantly overestimating how many HoTs one has to have stacked to get reasonable value out of the mastery.” This is exactly the problem that makes the mastery feel psychologically bad, though. The answer is always going to be “more than 1 HOT”, and in that case, you are HOT-chasing like we did with mastery #2. People are always going to feel like the best strategy is to chase a HOT with another HOT so that you can maximize mastery healing. The mastery largely isn’t passive bonuses to your preferred healing style. It requires you to actively make decisions about whether or not you want the full benefit of your mastery or if you are okay only benefiting partially from it. Anyone interested in maximizing their mastery has to cast more heals than they might want on a particular target.

This is ultimately why Mastery #2 failed: It feels bad to have to chase your HOTs with more spells (either direct heals or HOTs). The mastery increases the feeling like you have to cast 2 heals for every person you heal (when everyone else around you casts 1 and moves on). This impact on our healing style in 20-man raids isn’t all that fun and makes it hard to keep up with other healers who don’t have to ‘waste GCDs’. So, for 5-mans, the new Legion mastery works fine, but in raids, it feels bad & taxing. Numerically on paper, the new mastery works out fine – but it feels psychologically wrong. The new mastery changes how we heal in ways that forces you to constantly think about the mastery, rather than constantly thinking about the best way to save someone’s life. In that way, you are investing a lot of time into a small number of people, which isn’t a viable 20-man strategy where your HOT investment in that smaller number of people is ultimately going to be stomped on by other people’s big AOE burst heals and result in overhealing.

Is there another option?

The most important point my trip down memory lane highlights is that the most popular druid mastery (the one we currently have today) works best because it places the buff on the healer. The most obvious solution would just be to go back to the old mastery if the new one won’t work. However, most of the time we were using Swiftmend to “prime” our mastery today, and the cooldown change for Swiftmend means we’d have to rely on a different strategy for getting our mastery buff (which would probably waste fewer GCDs than a HOT-chasing strategy). Overall, looking at the history of druids, it would be more rewarding and feel more natural if the mastery worked with our HOT spreading design, rather than requiring HOT stacking.

It might be possible to change the Legion mastery to put a stacking buff on the druid that increases our healing done for each person who has a HOT on them. We’d obviously need a cap on any type of self-buff so that it didn’t spiral out of control (e.g., maybe 3?). That said, with the fact that druids always spread around our HOTs, that kind of mastery might feel too passive & boring. Then again, maybe a passive & “boring” mastery is better than returning to the days of mastery #2, where you chased your HOTs with other spells just for the purpose of gaining more mastery benefit.

Overwatch, Blizzard’s newest game in development, is primarily a player versus player (PVP) game, involving first-person shooting and controlling objectives. For people experienced with the genre of multi-player shooting games, it takes little time to be ready to jump into PVP matches. For people newer to this type of game, jumping straight into PVP matches can often come across pretty intimidating. While the game is still in beta, I thought I would provide a preview of some of the tools new players can use to learn the game.

Basic Tutorial

The first tool available to new players is a basic tutorial. This involves learning the movement controls and the basics of how to shoot a weapon. This is helpful to run once (or maybe twice at most if you are super new to video games). However, this limits you to only learning the spells of one character and is a linear experience where you don’t have much freedom to explore. While this is a helpful first step for getting the very basics, this is really only a first introduction and not somewhere you spend any significant amount of time.

Practice Range

A much more flexible place to learn each of the heroes is the new Practice Range. This range is a fairly open map with several types of AI bots: Some stand still and do nothing, others move around, and some even shoot back. You can climb up ontop of things to practice sniping or grappling. You can practice jumping around and using all your mobility tools (you can die if you fall off the side of the map!).

Want to practice on a support hero? There are some friendly bots that allow you to target them with heals, shields, and buffs (some even conveniently take damage and die, allowing you to test out Mercy’s resurrection ultimate to bring them back to life).

Overall, this practice arena gives you the opportunity to train your skills and learn the hero abilities before you embarrass yourself in public. Given that the game rewards split-second decisions, and swapping characters in the heat of battle, this chance to hone your skills is definitely something new players should take advantage of! My aim has definitely improved and my confidence has increased by the addition of this game mode.

Play Versus AI

When you understand the basics of how the characters work, you can progress your characters by playing PVE style games against a team controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence (AI). This is a cooperative mode where your team consists of real people, playing against the AI characters. While the difficulty level of this experience is still being worked out, these AI matches are much more forgiving than PVP for new players. You are able to gain experience and rewards in these AI matches, though you will progress more slowly than when you battle in PVP.

The benefit of these AI games is that the games are typically more forgiving of mistakes. You still get the full team experience, with people to back you up. It’s a good way to practice any of the heroes you aren’t comfortable on in an environment that simulates what real battle will feel like. This allows you to get good at scanning the environment for threats, learning map layouts and objectives, learning how to aim at moving targets, and learning how to play as a team.

Once you have mastered the Play versus AI mode, you are then ready to take on real PVP matches where you can go up against other players and be provided with much more difficult challenges. You are always welcome to come back to the practice grounds or AI matches any time you want! I look forward to seeing how these new player features grow and improve across Beta!